Why Steam-Powered Distribution Made Sense for Indie Game: The Movie

For independent moviemakers, film festivals can be like speed-dating — show off your best qualities to as many distributors as possible and hope that someone wants to take you out to theaters. And at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the creators of Indie Game: The Movie entertained nearly every suitor at the party.

Then they decided to go stag.

Instead of selling their documentary about hotshot game developers to the most impressive paramour, filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot took their movie on the road and then released it digitally themselves. Inspired by Kevin Smith and Helvetica director Gary Hustwit, they showed Indie Game in 15 cities before Tuesday’s online premiere, which makes it the first full-length feature film to be released through videogame distribution service Steam.

“We had no idea what [distribution] deals looked like and we had no idea what a good deal is or what a bad deal is, so we listened to absolutely everything and went with what made sense for the project and also from a practicality standpoint,” Swirsky said in an interview with Wired. “Self-distribution ended up being the way to go, because everything else made the movie come out later and more restricted.”

Indie Game, which became a critic’s darling after screening at Sundance and South by Southwest, might be the most heart-wrenching documentary ever made about videogame developers. It follows designer Edmund McMillen and programmer Tommy Refenes as they nervously anticipate the release of their Xbox title Super Meat Boy, and also chronicles Phil Fish’s epic quest to make and release his passion project Fez. Those stories are tied together by the tale of Jonathan Blow, who blew minds with his indie game Braid, and his mental struggles with whether to once again delve into game development.

The independent nature of their subjects inspired the filmmakers to go with indie distribution, and especially with Steam. “That’s where Super Meat Boy and Braid and World of Goo and eventually Fez, that’s where they live,” Swirsky said. “To actually be beside them — it just made way too much sense.”

“Normally a movie would come out at Sundance and you wouldn’t see it in theaters until November or October.”

With hundreds of Kickstarter backers (who had prepaid for the film) and many more who had been following the movie on Twitter and the film’s website, Pajot and Swirsky feared that waiting for Indie Game to go through a traditional distribution cycle would cause the movie’s momentum to evaporate. Releasing it themselves gave them the opportunity to get the film to its biggest fans as quickly as possible (Kickstarter backers get their movie downloads Tuesday).

“Normally a movie would come out at Sundance and you wouldn’t see it in theaters until November or October,” Swirsky said. “We looked at the vibe online that had been following this and it just didn’t seem like that would work.”

In addition, the filmmakers estimate that, based on pre-orders and mailing list addresses, more than 50 percent of their audience lives outside North America, and hammering out a series of international distribution deals would deny those viewers immediate access to the film.

None of this is to say that Swirsky and Pajot got nothing out of their trip to Park City, Utah. In addition to a crash course in the movie-distribution business, they also got their documentary optioned for an HBO show, which they said is still in the works. But when it came to the film’s release, the filmmakers knew there was only one way to get Indie Game to its die-hard supporters as quickly as possible. Considering the success they’ve had, their model could serve as a guide for indie filmmakers of the future.

“Everything in traditional distribution is all tied together — the theatrical is done a certain way and as a result the digital is done a certain way,” Pajot said. “And we had a vision that we wanted people to be able to see the film digitally as fast as possible, all over the world, from our website, or in the other ways they may prefer like Steam or iTunes. In order to do that, we had to do this on our own.”